At HubKonnect, we are proud to live in the golden age of AI – a critical time where we are seeing massive advancements in the world of Cognitive Computing and machine learning. Many of our clients, when we initially meet with them, think that we are still quite far away from a world where machines are able to learn and evolve by themselves.
We only need to look at an average day to see just how exciting things are and just how much we using AI in our everyday lives. You wake up in the morning with a song playing through your sound system. This song has been recommended for you by Spotify, which has learned what you like from your previous music selections. Your intelligent personal assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, has set off the alarm and started coffee for you. As you get up, you feel the temperature is perfect, as Alexa has been interacting with Nest (a thermostat system), and has set the temperature just right for this time of day.
On your drive to your office, Google Maps tells you that your current route is congested, recommends a shorter route for you and tells you how much time you’ll be saving. You make a stop at a supermarket to buy a morning snack, where cognitive algorithms have learned which products to place in every aisle of the market. You use a credit card to make a purchase, a card where AI previously decided if you qualify for credit or not, and what the limit should be.
At work, you discreetly check your Facebook feed and an employee of yours has posted something in a foreign language, which translates instantly with the push of the button and enables you to tell them to “get back to work.” You want to post a picture that you took over the weekend and AI’s facial recognition is able to recognize your friend and you can tag her instantly. A learning algorithm has decided which Twitter updates you are most interested in. When you take your daily medications – these are medications which have been designed and tested by cognitive systems. And when you check your email, all the spam email has been filtered into a separate folder, by an algorithm that has learned to recognize spam, and automatically send a response to the email sender.
You get home and decide to watch Netflix with your partner, and program recommendations are shown based on your previous choices. Before you start watching the program, you pick up your iPhone and say, “Hey Siri, what am I doing tomorrow?” and Siri replies and tells you what events are on tomorrow’s calendar.
So the moral of this story: When someone comes into your office and starts talking AI, it is not a scene out of iRobot…..you are currently using AI every day to make your life easier. All of these advancements in machine learning have come about mostly in the last couple of years, and we are going to see even more massive jumps in the near future. And it’s all happening right now, very exciting times. Embrace Cognitive Computing and AI, maximize your Local Customer Engagement plans and let HubKonnect help take you into this exciting new world.